Is Shaving Hygienic?
Removing body hair has been popular, especially for women, for a long time, and removing pubic hair has increased massively in the last 15 years or so. A commonly cited reason for shaving body hair (almost always in women) is that it’s more hygienic. A survey carried out in the US in 2016 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 83% of women surveyed performed pubic hair grooming and 59% of those women do so for hygiene reasons. A YouGov article from 2012 also provided a selection of comments on whether or not women and men should remove their body hair. Here are some of my favourites:
While I’m going to focus on women in this article, I’d like to point out that those last two comments were aimed at men, so the idea that body hair is dirty on women but not on men thankfully doesn’t prevail everywhere.
Research into why humans have body hair in the first place is ongoing. It has been suggested that body hair has multiple purposes, such as reducing friction on the skin, indicating sexual maturity, and preventing infection. This last point is the one I am most interested in in this article. Can removing body hair make you more vulnerable to infection, or less?
I searched for research articles about the presence of bacteria and the rate of infections and injury in people who remove their body hair. The results were mainly about women, mainly about shaving, and mainly about the removal of pubic hair. This is what I found.
A study published in 2012 in the journal Urology supports an argument against hair removal, which is that the methods used to remove hair, such as shaving and waxing, can cause injuries, which won’t occur if you just left the hair alone. The study describes injuries caused by pubic hair removal seen in hospitals in the US. Shaving was the most common cause of injury, with laceration being the most common type of injury. Another study published in 2014 in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology found that 60% of women who removed their pubic hair had suffered at least one related health problem, the most common being abrasions and ingrown hairs. And these are only injuries bad enough to go to a hospital about, as the patients in the Urology paper specifically went to hospital for those injuries. I’m sure everyone reading this who has shaved will have had a minor cut at some point. Some studies, one of which will appear later, also say that shaving often causes tiny micro tears that are invisible, so even if you don’t think you’ve had an injury from shaving, you probably have.
A study published in Infectious Diseases in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2017 even found a possible link between removing pubic hair and vulvar dysplasia, a condition that can progress to cancer. Although this study had a fairly small sample size, and therefore had to use less powerful statistics, this might be a correlation that is worth following up.
There is also evidence from comparisons between hospital workers who shave their facial hair and those who don’t that suggests that shaved skin harbours more dangerous types of bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, and may therefore be more vulnerable to infection. This is especially true if shaving causes any cuts or abrasions, which we’ve just seen is pretty common. While this study isn’t about body hair, it could possibly be extrapolated to shaving other parts of the body.
Hair removal by shaving before surgery is also associated with an increased chance of infection. Shaving the surgical site is actually intended to reduce the chance of infection, but a meta-analysis published the Journal of Hospital Infection in 2015 found that the opposite is true. Although this situation is a bit different from someone shaving at home, as the subjects in these studies are likely to have health problems and be exposed to hospital-acquired infections, the results of these studies could still be relevant, since it does suggest that shaving makes the body more vulnerable to infection. Additionally, other methods of hair removal, such as depilation creams and clipping, didn’t seem to prevent infection either, compared with not removing hair at all. This might suggest that hair isn’t as dirty as we think it is.
The comment from earlier about hair being unhygienic because it requires more washing is an interesting one, but I think our hospital workers with beards study also indicates that it isn’t as simple as hair acting as a trap for bacteria, which is unhygienic. It’s possible that the skin is a better environment for bacteria and removing hair actually encourages bacterial growth, while leaving it alone safely keeps the bacteria away. So, when hair is removed, all the sweat and bacteria will still be there, just directly on the skin and clothes. I’ve already said that cuts on the skin becoming infected are probably the biggest argument against hair removal being more hygienic, and this is possibly how it happens. Also, the scalp also sweats, but no one shaves their head because it’s more hygienic. Maybe we just need to be less afraid of the sweat and bacteria that naturally occurs on our bodies.
Now, there is some evidence that the incidence of pubic lice has decreased in recent years, as described in a short paper published in the British Medical Journal in 2006. This could be due to pubic hair removal, although the authors didn’t directly measure hair removal. Incidences of chlamydia and gonorrhea rose during the same time period, which suggests that the change in the prevalence of pubic lice is not due to changes in sexual behaviour that would lead to a decrease in all sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Another study published in the British Medical Journal in 2016 goes further and suggests that there is a positive correlation between pubic hair removal and the incidence of STIs. Possible explanations for this include that hair removal causes tiny cuts that get infected with certain types of STI, or that those who remove hair are more likely to have unsafe sex or a high number of partners, which increases their chance of getting an STI. Unfortunately the study didn’t ask about safe sex, which is admittedly a big flaw in this study, so the exact cause is unclear.
Of course, these studies won’t tell us everything we want to know, and as I said at the start, they mainly focus on women (instead of men), shaving (instead of other hair removal methods like waxing), and pubic hair (instead of other types of body hair). But I think there’s some good evidence for body hair not being so bad, and shaving being a potentially risky method of removing it. I don’t think they uphold the idea that shaving is more hygienic than not shaving.
I don’t want to tell people whether or not they should shave, although I hope that those who really don’t want to are brave enough to accept their body hair. Plus I recognise that some people must perform hair removal for their own safety. I simply wanted to present the evidence against the common opinion that removing body hair is more hygienic than leaving it alone.
Is Shaving Hygienic?
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